Post-structuralism,
Deconstruction, and Postmodernism
A presentation by:
Bryan Foster & Miranda Mueller
Groundworks for
Deconstruction
The philosophies that guided
Derrida’s works
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
• Major works: On truth and lying
(1873), Human, all too Human
(1878), Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
On Truth and Lying,
Nietzsche
• Absolute knowledge is impossible, even of simple things.
Our ignorance of real truth is dissimulated from us by our
own minds and the structures of language and ideology we
take for granted. Language is arbitrary, comprised of
metaphors layered atop other metaphors.
Martin Heidegger
(1889 - 1976)
• Some influences:
Thomas Aquinas,
Immanuel Kant, Heinrich
Rickert, Edmund Husserl
• Major Works: Being and
Time (1927), Höderlin's
Hymn "The Ister" (1942),
The Principle of Reason
(1955), Identity and
Difference (1956)
Identity and Difference,
Heidegger
Being
Existence
Difference
Identity and Difference,
Heidegger
Difference
Being
Existence
Differance
Jacques Derrida’s contribution to
deconstruction
Jacques Derrida (19302004)
• Major influcences: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Jean-Jaques
Rousseau, Louis Althusser,
Ferdinand de Saussure,
Martin Heidegger
• Major works: Writing and
Difference (1967) Of
Grammatology (1967)
Dissemination, (1972)
Limited Inc (1988)
Differance, The importance
of a semiotic analysis:
Why the “a”?
• Proof that language is comprised of
arbitrary signs that live in a play of
differences
• Not capitalized because it is not “some
ineffable being that cannot be approached
by name”
• Rationalization between spatiality and
temporality
– Defer
– Differ
• Indecision between activity and passivity
that shows the uselessness of binary
oppositions
Differance: a (hopefully)
useful chart
Blood
Heart
Square
Artery
Love
Red
Shape
Differance is NOT…
• A name, but a “nominal unity” (297)
• “a word nor a concept” (283)
• A “being-present” (298)
– For if it were, it would be conceived with
nostalgia
– Therefore it is the difference between “Being and
being, present and presence”
– It is the deployment of Being
Differance is…
• The movement of play that produces
differences allowing language and signs to
exist
– Differences in phonemes make up a language,
but these differences are a result of something
else. “Differences [therefore language] did not
fall out of the sky”
• Relation of speech to language
– As opposed to Saussure’s idea that speech is put
in opposition to language
Differance is…
• Freudian!
• The origin of psyche and memory
• The differences involved in the
production of unconscious traces and
the process of inscription
– Specifically “moments of differance”
• The outlet in which the
restricted/inaccessable system (the
unconscious)
Differance is…
• The foundation for arche-writing
• Arche-writing: a concept of writing
that insists that the gap or breach
introduced between what is intended
to be conveyed and what is actualy
conveyed, is standard, coming from
an initial breach that afflicts
everything one intends to express,
even self-presence within the work
Understanding
Deconstruction
Some useful explanations of
really really big words
Understanding Deconstruction:
Phenomenology
• Philosophy established by Edmund
Husserl
• Concerned with how the mind might come
to know and understand true ideas.
• A “phenomena”, here, would be the
mental representation of an object
Understanding
Deconstruction: Epoch
• A process wherein the physical and
temporal is stripped away from the
metaphysical, where an object and its
representations are reduced to a pure
idea.
• According to Derrida, the period of time
between Plato and Husserl in which
metaphysics reigned.
Understanding
Deconstruction: Logos
• From the Greek word for mind, reason,
and language
• The notion of a pure and ideal truth
grasped intuitively and without the need
for or intermediary of signifiers.
• Identified with “phonocentrism” by Derrida
Understanding Deconstruction:
Onto-theology
• The belief that existence has substance
and/or presence, rather than being
generated by a series of semi-determinate
things, each of them generated in much
the same manner.
• (Differentially)
• Literally means “religion of being”
Understanding Deconstruction:
Aufhebung
• Translation: sublimation
• Refers to the hypothetical transformation
of ideas into signifiers (eg: thought into
language), and their return to the state of
“idea” through comprehension by another
• eg: somebody hears you and gets what
you’re saying
Understanding
Deconstruction: Erinnerung
• Translation: memory
• The idea that signs retain the “spirit” of
the idea that has been invested in them.
• Signs (words and symbols) are held to
merely be temporary receptacles of an
idea.
Understanding
Deconstruction: Trace
• Also known as otherness or alterity
• Everything that appears to have its own
identity is in fact constructed by its
relationship with or difference from other
things.
• These things are held to carry a “trace” of
each other.
Semiology and Grammatology,
Derrida and Kristeva
• Deconstructing metaphysics
– Stop searching for the “transcendental truth”!
• Tear down the idea of binary oppositions
– Try differentiating language and speech, code
and message, etc. as Saussure did.
– According to Derrida, it is impossible to know
where to start in defining these binary terms.
– Therefore, differance works because it functions
on the relation of differences instead of
differences themselves
Post-structuralism,
Deconstruction, and
Authorship
Barbara Johnson (19472009)
• Major Works: A world of difference
(1987), The Critical Difference
(1980), The Feminist Difference
(1998), The Wake of
Deconstruction (1994)
• Schools of Thought/ Major ideas:
structuralism, post-structuralism,
Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist
critical theory
Writing, Johnson
• Summarizes the basic points of other
writers – Barthes, Saussure, Lacan,
Derrida – and explains the impact of each,
followed by he destabilization of the eariler
writers by the later ones.
• She argues, using this premise, for the
inclusion of historical, psychoanalytical,
political, and philosphical concepts in
analysis and their prevalence in 20th
century French thought.
• Reading is held to to be the simple task of
grasping the meanng of a text, but of
grasping its multiple possible
interpretations, even when they are
contradictory. (polysemy)
Roland Barthes
(1915-1980)
• Major works:
Mythologies (1957),
Empire of Signs
(1970), The Death of
the Author (1968)
Death of the Author,
Barthes
• Give credit to the reader
• Including the author historicizes, and
therefore limits the text
• The author cannot express himself because
what he thinks must be translated by a
dictionary (of signs) that is not a direct
representation of his thoughts.
• A text is not “a line of words releasing a
single ‘theological’ meaning”; rather, it is a
“multi-dimensional space in which a variety
of writings, none of them original, blend
and clash”
– Differance
Michel Foucauld (19261984)
• Influences: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Louis Althusser,
Georges Dumézil, Karl Marx
• Major Works: Discipline and
punish: The birth of the prison
(1975), The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969), The Order
of things (1966), Death and
the Labyrinth (1963)
What is an author?,
Foucauld
• The Author as a celebrated and central
figure to their body of work is a modern
conceit
• The “I” in literature does not refer in any
direct way to the author currently, but was
rather a temporary intermediary between
the work and its creator
• Suggests a world in which the author was
no longer the “regulator of the fictive”,
constraining the work by his presence, a
hypothetical place of anonymous
production and therefore potentially
unlimited interpretation